Bureaucracy is a term from Latin and French that means desk. Bureaucracy meant all public offices in eighteenth-century France and also the power and action of employees in offices and any other work environment.
Bureaucracy is a concept related to the disproportionate predominance of the administrative apparatus in the whole of public life or private business. It consists of government exercised by officials, nicknamed "official tyranny", lacking in imagination. It considers the public as an amorphous mass, susceptible to being transformed into numbers and expedients. Its reason for existence is based on a "correct", meticulous and unrealistic schematism. It is especially characterized by its impossibility to deviate from the "safe" and orthodox norms and instructions, already known and tried.
Bureaucracy is also used in a pejorative way, when talking about the procedures of a process, by example, to start a business, to take a case to court, to issue original documents etc. Many thinkers claim that this way of looking at bureaucracy is characteristic of lay people, and indicate that the modern bureaucracy is the more efficient mode of administration, both in the private domain (in a capitalist company, for example) and in administration public.
Bureaucracy - Max Weber
Bureaucracy is also part of the studies by the German economist Max Weber, who created the Theory of Bureaucracy, to explain the way companies organize themselves. Weber defined bureaucracy as an organization based on regular rules and procedures, where each individual has their own specialty, responsibility and division of tasks.
Weber said that impersonality, administration, social and economic differences between people and a level of hierarchy are also concentrated in bureaucracy. Max Weber based his theory on seven principles: formalization of rules, division of labor, hierarchy, impersonality, technical competence, separation between properties and predictability of each employee.
According to Weber, the main peculiarities of a bureaucratic system are:
- Employees who occupy bureaucratic positions are considered public servants;
- Employees are hired according to their technical competence and specific qualifications;
- Employees carry out tasks that are in accordance with written rules and regulations;
- Compensation is based on wages stipulated in cash;
- Employees must adhere to hierarchical rules and disciplinary codes that underlie authority relationships.
State and Public Administration Bureaucracy
In one of his works, Ludwig von Mises (Austrian economist and sociologist) hinted that in the state bureaucracy there is no appreciation for reality. From a bureaucratic point of view, a large and powerful state represents an unquestionable advantage. However, security and reliability in State action do not necessarily mean bureaucracy, which is often synonymous with lack of uniformity in procedures, slow service and unforeseen requirements in the texts regulatory requirements.
A distinctive feature of bureaucratic public administration is that there is a clear distinction between the public and the private, with a separation between the political and the public administrator.
Bureaucracy in Brazil
The political system in force in Brazil is closely linked with the concept of bureaucracy presented by Weber, having taking into account that it has in view an ideal system for the regulation of the State, as foreseen in the system “legal-rational”. In Brazil, bureaucracy often means that many processes are not completed correctly.
Bureaucratization, in the context of the Brazilian state, is related to important changes in the structure and way in which society is organized. The bureaucratization in Brazil gave rise to the creation of new functions and administrative bodies, and thus the public mechanism underwent a very rapid transformation, becoming a high- complexity. However, what may have been achieved in administrative efficiency has been lost in terms of political effectiveness.
